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OK Cupid Tells Users They Can Pay With Bitcoin

As a company whose business proposition has gone from kind of weird to utterly commonplace in the space of a few years, OK Cupid has always been comfortable with novelty. Now it’s embracing a new technology that strikes a lot of people as too futuristic for comfort: Bitcoin.

Starting today, premium users of the IAC-owned dating service can pay for their subscriptions with the untraceable peer-to-peer digital currency.

OK Cupid CEO Sam Yagan says this is a forward-looking move, driven not by user demand but by the imperative to embrace a technology that’s not going away.

“There’s no question that these digital currencies are going to be the future,” he says. “Whether it’s actually the form of Bitcoins or evolves into something else, we want to be out in front. We want to be the ones who have the experience. There’s a lot to learn.”

As a company whose operations are, like Bitcoin’s, rooted in an algorithm, OK Cupid is in a good position to learn, says Yagan. “We use math to get you dates and they use math to make transactions secure,” he says.

In fact, pre-OK Cupid, Yagan was involved in launching a peer-to-peer file sharing service of his own, called eDonkey. “I’m pretty sure [Bitcoin] uses a lot of similar algorithms to the ones we used,” he says.

While there have been a very small number of requests from OKC users wanting to pay in Bitcoin — “I can probably count them on two hands” — that’s beside the point, says Yagan. He likens the situation to the early days of iOS, when smart developers recognized that it was a platform worth building for despite the then-small user base.

But while OK Cupid wants to be a player in virtual currencies, it’s not looking to take a page from the Winklevoss twins and become a Bitcoin speculator. Among the tricky technical challenges it’s grappling with is the need to get out of its Bitcoin position at the end of each day. ”As we saw last week, there’s been tremendous volatility in the price,” says Yagan.

Nor is it inviting its advertisers to pay Bitcoin for their display ads — although that may change it if starts to get requests, he adds.

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